What was the most brutal battle in history? I'd say Verdun, Stalingrad or Berlin, but I'm leaning towards Verdun: >First use of the flamethrower. >Hour after hour of artillery barrages. >No way to remove corpses, decaying bodies literally everywhere. >People in forts drink their own urine, nearly starve to death. >Catastrophic casualty rate. >Germans completely fail to achieve their objective. >No real winner.
A few choice quotes:
"They must be crazy to do what they are doing now: what a bloodbath, what terrible images, what a slaughter. I just cannot find the words to express my feelings. Hell cannot be this dreadful. Humans are insane!"
"One soldier was going insane with thirst and drank from a pond covered with a greenish layer near Le Mort-Homme. A corpse was afloat in it; his black countenance face down in the water and his abdomen swollen as if he had been filling himself up with water for days now."
On Flamethrower Attacks: "They were so unrecognisable mutilated that we could not decide on their identities. Their skin was black entirely. One of them died that same night. In a fit of insanity the other hummed a tune from his childhood, talked to his wife and his mother and spoke of his village. Tears were in our eyes."
Cannae was pretty brutal. It was an all out slaughterfest, sure, but it also claimed the lives of a huge number of senatorial up and comers, not to mention a Consul. Basically a hell of a lot of the future political class was just wiped out in a day.
Grayson Watson
Why do you think the battle of Berlin was particularly brutal OP? The mass rapes? The Warsaw uprising was much more violent in terms of rape and civilian deaths. German soldiers described it as a "second Stalingrad". You'd also be hard pressed to find any Russian groups during the battle of Berlin as violent/deranged as oskar dirlewanger penal battalion.
Aiden Gray
war poet Siegfried Sassoon wrote: ‘I died in Hell (they called it Passchendaele)’.
On 31st July, after a barrage of an incredible 4 ½ million shells, fired from 3,000 guns, the British advance began. Surrounding woods and villages were obliterated for miles around. But the shellfire turned the upward slopes into a nightmare of shell holes, splintered trees, barbed wire and smashed field drainage systems. Then came the worst rains for thirty years, just as the British infantry attacked. The ground became a sea of mud and corpses. Soldiers floundered in the flooded morass. British tanks bogged down and became useless. Swept by German machine gun fire, gas shells and artillery, Passchendaele entered the lexicon of military horrors.
Justin Murphy
without technology Catalaunian Plains in 451 in Chalons where Attila lost half of his army (300.000 kia) or Tumu Crisis in 1449 in China where Mongols slaughtered 200.000 chinese soldiers and captured the Emperor Yingzong of Ming
Nathan Stewart
for the western world it may be, I mostly bring up war crimes such as the allied strategic bombing over Dresden or the aftermath of the Battle of Suiyang China 757 AD; they were on account of military force.
Daniel Hill
fulkenhyne had set up Verdun to be a bloodbath on purpose for the French. He called it a bloodletting of the French army. He didn't tell his officers that though because he wanted them to look like they were really trying and then he eventually realized he couldn't just walk away from the battle without anything to show but a body count and fell into his own trap for propaganda and moral purposes and eventually the German death rate caught up ot the French.
He could have taken the whole thing really early when there were barely any defenders but didn't want to because it was pointless and he wanted France to send in as many man as they could to his planned meat grinder.
After he decided to try to capture it the place was fully defended.
David Mitchell
That's Cologne, not Dresden
Angel Mitchell
His penal battalion gets way to much credit. Yea they did fucked up stuff but it's only a battalion
Nolan Anderson
bloodiest and most brutal one-day battle would probably be Cannae. with over 80,000 dead in just a few hours it took place as a conservative number.
but as for brutal in that it shatters your mental state and leaves people broken through constant fighting, the Somme or Verdun are up there. Just artillery strikes and machine gun fire that never lets up for months at a time would break any man.
Josiah Torres
I recognize that last quote
Its from Louis barthas Journal
Its a good read for anyone interested in WWI
Aaron Richardson
>>No real winner.
Germans attack fort in an attempt to take it. Fail. Retreat with heavy losses to their best forces.
Sounds like a pretty clear defeat. German generals of the time certainly thought if it as such.
The land has also been lost to France due to how fucked up it became
Cooper Howard
The moral losse for Germany was big though
Gavin Mitchell
They other fucked up thing about Verdun was that literally both sides planned for the battle to be a "blood mill", meaning that they would try to bleed the enemy nation white from horrendous attrition in order to force them to concede. And, ultimately, it had little strategic value.
Just think. All those men died for almost nothing. I won't say that their sacrifice was completely in vain but...I think there are few causes that have been died for that were less pointless.
Tyler Cook
Passchendaele
Who would think that mud could be so deadly?
Connor Stewart
>Who would think that mud could be so deadly?
Those who fought at Verdun (which was basically Passchendaele but much worse)
>The concentration of so much fighting in such a small area devastated the land, resulting in miserable conditions for troops on both sides. Rain, combined with the constant tearing up of the ground, turned the clay of the area to a wasteland of mud full of human remains. Shell craters became filled with a liquid ooze, becoming so slippery that troops who fell into them or took cover in them could drown. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Verdun#Aftermath
Ethan Thomas
Verdun was only slightly more deadly than Passchendaele
Walter Model used the Waffen-SS as a distraction while he dug the fuck in.When the Waffen-SS pulled back, Zukov decided to keep running his men into the Salient.
Kevin Sanders
Looks like the plot of The Warriors but in Latvia.
Jace Torres
Okinawa >Only battle of those listed in which small arms, not artillery, was the primary mode of death. >Close, cave-to-cave combat with an enemy who will not surrender. >Catastrophic casualty rate. >25% of all American casualties are psychiatric, most of any battle. >130,195 dead over 2.5 months (52,078 per month compared to Verdun's 30,400) >150,000 civilian deaths
Kevin Thomas
The annual Battle for Kharkov.
Anthony Fisher
>That webm
jesus christ...
"GAME OVER, MAN! GAME OVER!"
Oliver Moore
Nivelle Offensive
He may have regretted it, but Nivelle still deserves to burn in hell for that.
Levi Morris
...
Matthew Ramirez
Not nightmarish casualties like the Somme or Verdun, but Caen. A division of German boys put the hurt on older Canadian and British men.
Hunter Ward
I would say Stalingrad due to the casualties, but I think you're right. The fighting in some areas around Verdun was so intense that the locations have actually been sealed off and aren't deemed habitable for humans due to the amount of arsenic, human remains, and unexploded munitions still under the soil
Landon Kelly
This desu The rapes of German women and in particular the mass suicides in Demmin were horrible but at least the Soviets didn't release convicted child rapists, gypsies, mental asylum patients, and criminals to purposefully terrorize people as the Germans did in Poland
Kevin Collins
That one time when the Germans and the Poles pulled a City 17 uprising on Warsaw.
Chase Wilson
...
Dylan Hall
It was a brigade though
Noah Anderson
There was a good reason as to why that unit had been activated.Partisans were a serious threat and they needed to fight brutality with brutality. They should have never been used for occupation and civilian pacification however and in all honesty they all should have went into the gas chambers. But manpower is manpower.
Kayden Fisher
>gypsies casually thrown in there as well Kek.
Caleb Kelly
Initially a brigade size, it turned into a full strength Division.
Josiah Richardson
Honestly reminds me of one HOI3 game I played as Germany. My border with Russia was weak in some areas at the time, and when Russia decided to declare war on me they trapped about 400,000 of my men in East Prussia and Lithuania. The road to Berlin was basically open, defended only by a few panzer divisions and militia. I had to beg for ships from the Italians to try and evacuate troops from the East Prussia pocket. Eventually, however, the pocket broke and what few divisions I had near Berlin could not hold the Russians off
Jeremiah Brooks
They literally were part of the unit though
It's true.
Julian Parker
Gettysburg, or yorktown.
Jordan Collins
Over 200 millions of shells were fired at Verdun, on a relatively small area I don't know if that record was ever broken since then but I doubt it
